Letter on hydrogen: Synthesising a future for e-fuels

E-fuels remain too expensive for many buyers, but emerging policies in the maritime sector could boost their prospects in that key market

If you were to take all of the used cooking oil from all of the McDonald’s restaurants in the UK, you would still not have enough to fuel one ship, according to Lara Naqushbandi, CEO of ETFuels, an e-methanol producer. She used this example to highlight the feedstock challenge facing conventional biofuels, the use of which has been supported relentlessly by the EU over the last 20 years. “If you look at the supply growth of biofuels over the last 15–20 years, it has been less than 5% every year. And why is that? It is because, fundamentally, biofuels are feedstock constrained,” she told the IE Week conference in London. Naqushbandi makes a valid point, and the debate over the ethics of biofu